


E.X.O.D.U.S.

by Dratz



Series: Re:Connected [4]
Category: Zoids
Genre: Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 08:52:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13737387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dratz/pseuds/Dratz
Summary: Plagued by a recurring nightmare that features a mysterious, shadowed monster, Burton retreats into Erca Forest to try to cope with the fear. But a new foe emerges from beneath the safety of the trees, and he and his Lord Gale are forced to do battle.





	E.X.O.D.U.S.

**Author's Note:**

> _Omega_ is an alternate spelling of O.M.E.G.A. (short for Operative Mobile Elite Governing Apparatus).
> 
>  _Exodus_ is an alternate spelling of E.X.O.D.U.S. (short for EXecutive Offensive Dual Usurpation System).

Time had not been kind to him, eating his heart out, leaving dust in his hair. He’d stand at the cliffs rising up from the Forest and breathe in the frigid mountain air, and looking at a changing world, golden leaves, a blackened sky, empty lines on his fingers that bled late at night, with his teeth pressed together and his body so stiff he might shatter. Expecting the wind to push him over the edge, to the river bends, the shadows that snuck up in hoards like an army and pulled at small spaces of tree bark and stone. And it was quiet--thrillingly quiet--with his pulse racing in his wrists and in his throat, a great plume of patience and fire, waiting for the sun to show and the hour to turn, so that he could stare the horizon face-to-face and curse his own sins of the past.

He stood motionless there, for hours to come, statuesque save for stray pieces of hair that swept about, dark in color, in a rising, icy wind. His face solemn, and starved for peace. Only the Lord Gale stayed by his side, overlooking the hills and the stars settled up in the sky, and he too was still, and silhouetted black against the inky clouds and alpine peaks. Watching everything fade away, while winter crept closer, just as expected, and choking to death the faint of heart.  


That morning, the light fell too late on their brows and Burton narrowed his eyes, deep and grey, as if to scout out something unsettling, stepped back from the border. Silent footsteps, a lowered head, he descended the stretch of the uneven slopes into the open arms of the Forest, familiar and sheltering and scented of intimacy and earth. The dragon followed, their shadows aligned, taking strange shapes across the leaf litter, and tinted curious shades of rust and gold.  


_‘Shouldn’t you sleep, Jed?’_ said Lollygag across their connection. He leaned over his human so that their noses nearly touched, and Burton stopped before the burly, knotted branches of two very old trees on the path.  


_‘I can’t,’_ he blinked, his lids heavy, and lips dry. For he’d been avoiding the nightmares that shook him so terribly that he would thrash and scream and wake with cold sweat on his brow. Filled with dark, forsaken things, a sucking void, the visage of some giant serpent-creature that sought to poison his mind with demands and lies and a toxin that stopped his lungs from working. So that he suffocated slowly, all alone, and torn by fear and failure with blood crusted over his throat and collarbone. His own blood, spilled and wasted, and with it what was left of his dignity.

Sometimes the nightmare-creature would curl its jowls about his ankles and bite him there, beat him to his knees with wire-frame wings, drag him about through a desolate grave of rotting nails and broken bones, til he weakened with pain and alarm and he could no longer struggle against the tide of its scales. Then it would toss him away, into a bottomless pit, where he fell in a loop and choked on his own bile and the smell of the venom spreading in his veins and weighing him down... down... and forced to remember everything he’d done wrong while he died and forgot his own name.

Lollygag would wake him from these visions and take him out into the Forest where he could see the stars and make up songs to fill the empty space in his chest. But the dreams came more frequently now, so that he avoided sleep and kept himself busy, translating different texts at his apartment desk well past midnight and crying to keep his eyes from closing shut. Then when he nodded off, the sequences would start again, and he’d race over the shadow-spun fields with the monster drooling at the back of his neck and reaching for him, and when it tripped him with its tail he saw their faces were the same in the reflection of its blood-coated armor.  


He’d gone deep into the middle of the mountain chains to ask Omega what it meant, but the god had only laughed at him, called him foolish, said he was infected with a kind of fear that only he could overcome.  


“This isn’t one of your _tricks_ , is it?” he frowned as the Seismos shifted zir massive legs somewhere near the center of the cavern. All dimly lit by the virus-green glow of zir eyes.

“You _dare_ accuse me?“ Omega had dipped zir jaw down toward him and Lollygag, and shook with a thunderous sneer. “I thought you wiser than that, Jed.”

“Just suspicious,” said Burton, bluntly, carefully, the muscles in his shoulders tense. “I _have_ asked you not to mess with my head.”

The Seismos scraped at the walls with zir tail, leaving faint marks like streaks of snow in the stone. “And I have since honored your request,” ze said. And then laughed at him again, shaking the roof of the caverns so fiercely that he thought for a moment the whole mountain would crumble. But it never did--the great god would study him carefully from the summer-leaf patterns of zir unblinking eyes, methodical, and said at last, “You are afraid, but you are not alone. Remember that.”  


So with those words he left the Seismosaurus and returned outside to stare into the night sky, Lollygag still at his side and humming gently at him, very soft, very troubled, for the air was cold and thin, and the wind as violent as ever. And Burton had not rested for such a long, long time--time lost to the creature that would come in the night and kill him in his dreams.

 _‘It’ll be alright, Lolly,_ ‘ he leaned his head against the Gale’s snout.

Lollygag whimpered in reply, his scanners busily surveying the area, all the dips in the dark where they could not see, the hidden secrets of a slumbering forest... _‘You need to sleep,’_ he tipped his giant, amber wings to shelter them both from the wind. It bellowed roughly from the chasms below and rushed north, sudden and swift, and unrivaled in colorless power. _‘You can’t continue on like this.’_

 _‘I know.’_ But he couldn’t lie down, couldn’t rest, couldn’t stand to see the nightmare-beast or have to die again and bleed out all alone in a tunnel of pain. When the sun rose, he climbed slowly into the Lord Gale’s cockpit and they made their way down into the heart of the Forest, where the trees were dropping their leaves and preparing for the grip of winter. Beneath the shadow of Omega’s mountains, they wound through makeshift paths while the canopy glittered with withering gold.  


Lollygag told him again to sleep, but Burton could not, watching the world die around him, the cold cache the ground and the clouds. When the mountain slopes and the valley below and the roads towards Blue City would be stiffened with blankets of thick, scentless ice. When the wind cursed him and he shivered at the thought of the nightmare-creature with his face and venomous spit that sent him into euthanasia from which he’d never wake again. The leaves danced around them like freshly-fallen snow.

On, the Gale walked for many more miles, a steady maze of tangled branches above him trying to catch the sun. Over roots and streams and sloping earth. Over dead trees left from last year’s freeze. And the hymn of rushing wind as it swelled and conquered.

They came to a clearing by a slow, steady brook and Lolly sat among the stones. The sound of the water rippling through cracks in the ice just beyond the reach of his claws and making its way downhill, where it would feed into the sea so far, far away, mixed with earth and salt as it had for centuries. There was a soft ping on the radar, that faded as quickly as it came, and Burton stared at the screens in such a state of delirium that could make no sense of the direction. Unwillingly, fighting the whole way, he fell into a brackish sleep while the Gale scanned the Forest, but there was nothing.  


In his sleep, he cried out and fled from the creature with claws and wings and saw it was joined at his own two feet--his shadow, growing and consuming him, pulling him down by the ankles as he died with poison in his blood and mind. And this time the shadow spoke--in his voice, coiled up around his throat and ear, “I found...” Over and over again, never able to complete the sentence. Flickering volume, sometimes muted, sometimes moaning dreadfully, half-choked with laughter.  


He could never form words in these dreams, only scream and shriek, but never in any language. It was Lolly’s pleading that brought him back to consciousness and he bolted forward in his seat, the harness snagging both shoulders. He panted and wiped the tears and sweat from his face while the Gale whined softly.  


_‘I’m fine,’_ he insisted, but Lollygag knew better, and continued to croon at him.  


In the distance, something spoke over the rough calls of water and wind, inaudible at first. Then steadily louder, thunder coming closer, bringing spells of the old world into the even older Forest.

Lollygag stood up and crept back into cover, away from the small, silver stream, and fell silent. Again, the same wraith-sound from beyond the trees, neither human, nor animal, and still so faint that it lacked any meaning.  


Then it rose once more:  


_‘I... found-’_

And vanished abruptly back into nothingness.  


Burton shuddered and took the controls; the same sudden ping went off on the radar. But nothing stirred in the rust-gold shadows--only the whisper of dead leaves on the wind.  


Anxious, the Gale began to recalibrate the settings, strengthening sensors, increasing the effective range. Burton’s breaths were scattered and uneasy. Answered only by the same, crackling words:

_‘I... found-’_  


It was a voice, a frequency, that neither he nor Lollygag could recognize, warped with excitement. And a very frail and crooked kind of joy.  


_‘... I found-’_

Again, through the wind-steered air like an enemy current, filling his lungs, his ears, his tired, troubled mind. The blip on the radar reappeared, then changed course all of a sudden and doubled in speed, barreling in their direction from somewhere in the valleys below. The Gale snarled and bristled, turning towards the signal with both arms raised and ready to strike the first blow.  


But a bolt of hot, burning energy shot out from beneath the branches, and struck him in the chest, stunning him in place; a shockwave of static and his startled screams locked the cockpit controls. Then something followed the loose string of fire, something large and black that rocketed around in the air, silent, sudden movements, jerking its head back and forth, pumping down with a pair of great wire-like wings....  


_‘I found you--!’_

It circled them, making sharp, sporadic turns, then stopped inches from the cockpit, staring down straight through the glass, the jaws parted in a labored, ecstatic smile, showing off its forward, serpent-fangs.  


Burton took the throttles in his shaking hands and tried to ease them forward, and Lollygag screeched, then pitched to the side. Dazed, every joint aching with an overdose of electrical energy, difficult to find his footing, and find the lines of code to lift his claws together and arm his weapon systems. He did so suddenly, as the big, black creature lunged at them and laughed. An iron, rasping laugh, tearing at the trees with its claws and great, dark shadow.  


It was twice Lolly’s length from snout to tail at least, and formed entirely of metal--a Zoid, a model Burton had never seen before, nor read of in any military database. It was heavily armored, but moved swiftly and suddenly, and hung in the autumn air like a great, polished statue, staring directly at them with savage green eyes. There was no pilot in its cockpit.  


_‘Who are you? What do you want?’_ His thoughts and the Gale’s were blended together. It could hear them, for it answered not on the channel, but in Burton’s mind, drowning out the surrounding sounds, of rotting leaf litter and tree limbs in the breeze.  


_‘I am the System. I am E.X.O.D.U.S. _I am the Dekalt Dragon._ ’ _It raised its golden-crowned head and matching wings, drawing closer, closer, catching shafts of cold sunlight in its teeth. On its polished armor, Burton saw his own panicked reflection, and it seemed to rile at that, exuberant, expectant, hunching its head between raised shoulders and gnashing its finely formed jaws. _  
_

_‘... I am going to kill you.’_

And it dove at them again, lightning-quick, with a deafening roar and lashing of its wings and talons, black and gold and blood-colored and blurred. Lollygag was fast enough to avoid it, counter back as he took to the air and aimed a blow with the Magnesser Spear--but by then, the Dekalt was hovering above the tree-line and studying them again. A flickering golden, flame erupting from between its jaws. It was laughing, laughing down at them, now touching its foreclaws together, both plated shoulders hunched.  


Burton shuddered quietly, recoiling to the bitter taste of blood and iron in his mouth.  


Both dragons trembled, and then shot for the sun, weeping terribly and ripping at each other with their splayed talons. The wind took them southward towards the snow-capped mountain chains, where they fought from summit to summit, leaving footprints over the snow, where no one would ever find them. Beating light, beating wings, their voices raised and angry and echoing for miles beyond, becoming rain. They thundered, downslope, and the Gale pinned the Dekalt and the Dekalt struck the Gale and found its footing on the ridgeline, and then they stood stiffly, facing each other in a stalemate, and seething in collective rage.  


_‘Can you Project over it, Lolly?’_   Burton tried not to dwell on the rusted taste between his teeth.

The Gale shook himself from side to side, _‘No... It’s- different. Not like the Chimera units, not like the Wild Zoids from the Forest. Other channels, other frequencies, foreign code...’_

Exodus interrupted them both, bellowing over ice and snow, _‘You would run from me in the Dream, Jed... Precious child. Powerless child!’_ Gripping at the frozen earth underneath. _‘You are tired, aren’t you? Sleep- Sleep where you can run from me, and run from your pain and your suffering- and you shall never wake again. I’ll rid the world of you; I’ll bury you-’  
_

Lollygag cried out in retort and lunged; his jaws closed around the Dekalt’s forearm, trying to cleave metal with metal. They tore into each other, fangs, flames, ferocity, the sheer force of their blows as they slashed at the spaces between their pitch-black armor. Then broke off again into the sky, silhouetted by light and the cold grip of violence as it feeds.  


And Burton’s mind was the wreckage of a whirlpool, battered by Exodus’ heavy blows and a lasting lack of sleep, shaken, drifting off and then back. Back to where? Back again, back again... Completely sporadic. Unable now to distinguish between his dreams and his wakened state, for the Dekalt was always there, sneering at him, reaching to trap him between the ravines of many bladed fangs. Lolly would have to Evolt, he thought, if they were to survive--and the Gale seemed to sense this.

He changed in a heartbeat, a flashing light, a curdling scream. He struck the Dekalt at the flank and sent it reeling back into the ice. There was a shower of light and bullets, the sound of metal against the surface of snow, and the two dragons chased their shadows round the summits, trying to catch the other in their jaws. They snapped and screamed, and met each other over the peaks, raking their throats with great, golden talons. The wind everywhere around them.  


Then they flew to the west, riding the currents, diving between mountain tops and the subtle glare of the sun. Burton bit his lip and trembled, pained and tired--they could not keep this form for long, he was too weak, he needed sleep and darkness and the infinite void of undisturbed silence.

But the dragons battled with the rage and the might of explosive old stars, scattering, reforming, bursts of sudden light and fire as they tried to reach the other’s core. To extinguish. To kill.

Exodus shivered and slowed for a moment, staying at a distance. Studying them, the way children study shapes and colors and names. And then everything was still and dark, and their shadows lengthened on their claws and faces. For a long while, they stared across an empty space, distances marked by withered remains of autumn and rain.  


It was a time of dying. They descend into the dirt and stared across the Forest floor, different pairs of eyes burning softly. _‘Go back to where you came from,’_ Lollygag’s transmissions were soft but stern, a warning. _‘Leave this place. Leave us alone.’_  


The Dekalt shook its crowned-jewel head, the serpent fangs barred at them hideously. _‘You know who sent me, don’t you?’  
_

Lollygag could only bow his head down--he would not say the name.  


_‘You... you and your human have upset the Scale; you have forgotten your place, the sense of your existence. So you must both be punished.’_ Exodus hissed, and hunched it shoulders, crouching at them. _‘I was made to hunt, I was Assembled to destroy--that is my purpose, that is my place. I have come to claim you, your lives, your names, your blood and dream-world spaces.'_

_'How can you talk of taking so much?_ _As if it was owed to you? As if you own it?’_

_‘That’s what power is, Gale.’  
_

They stood apart in the dirt. Dirty, dented creatures. Calling back and forth, two dragons with their gleaming scales and eyes and coiling tails and mud and rotting leaves and melting ice sticking to their flanks where they had thrown each other on the surface. The light around them died slowly.  


_‘Your power,’_ said Lollygag. _‘But not my power.’_ His head was low still, like a budding branch bent over, like a cresting wave over emerald ocean.  


A sneer. _‘What is your power, then?’_

 _‘I don’t know,’_ said Lollygag, in his very honest way. _‘I am learning still, I think.’_  


The Forest spoke steadily to them, but Exodus did not hear. In a whirl of teeth and anger, it lunged forward, and the two Zoids were tangled in their shadows again while the trees moaned and shuddered and leaned away. Lollygag broke from the mess of lashing claws, his wings raised, rising. They steered away from each other again and went racing in between the trees. A steady breeze bellowed across the blue and black horizon.

Burton still could not tell the difference between his dreams while he was rattled and shaken and dragged in and out of states of sleep. Seconds apart, everything a crooked blur. The mountains were below and then beside them, and he knew that somehow he was pulling on the controls and that Lollygag had chased the Dekalt and then the Dekalt had chased them up the steep, unyielding slopes. They went quickly, rushing on their armored wings, while the land around them held its breath...  


And then they were struck out of the sky, screaming, soundless; they fell like a comet, and lost consciousness. It was no use, they thought, for they had fought and fought, and now they could not fight. They drowned, reaching out for each other, in blindness and fear and the silent chokehold of pain that had pulled them both into some starless place. There they flailed a while longer, their eyes open and unseeing, and covered at every corner with darkness. Bodies unbound, full of flickering movements, fading. At last their voices bled through, following one another, scared and shrill. They were lost. The blackness was completely boundless.

Burton shuddered and started rapidly to die, tears on his face, scars in his mind, great dark scars, swords and caverns, and dried clots of blood. He could feel the Gale with him, the both of them helpless, both tumbling, plummeting, into a terrible, terrible, forbidden silence. The void opened, stared, surrounding them whole and ready to devour. They wept as the nothingness closed in around them.

But the shadows were blown into smoke by a great, heavy voice, of death and of power. They were no longer falling. The void no longer pressed with the weight of an ocean on their chests.

“Rise.” Omega snarled into them. From the earth. From darkness.

 _‘How..?’_ Burton thought, and Lolly thought, their pain and emptiness interconnected, extensive together. _‘I cannot-’_

"You **_will_**.”  


They saw the world again. The god had broken through from the heart of the mountain, zir head impossibly high in the sky, shrouded in the dark. Staring down, zir tail was coiled carefully around the Gale, holding onto dear life.  


Exodus tumbled, shrieked, recoiled, circled back and around and could not escape Omega’s giant, pressing shadow. Once or twice it jolted towards zem, only to reel back again, always being watched, always knowing there was nothing to be done.  


“Do not test me.” Omega thundered over everything, with the might of a toppling empire. And the Dekalt, head hunched, overpowered, retreated into the lengthening spell of cold and forest secrets.

The Seismosaurus spread zir toes into the soil and watched. Ze craned zir neck and looked beyond to the where the continent collided into space and where Exodus had fled. “This is what it’s like,” ze said, “to again see starlight on the Surface.” Ze released Lollygag, who had reverted to his usual state, and let him take wing above the treeline.

Burton cursed under his breath using the language he’d spoken in the place he was born and sank down against the dashboard. Death was not so terrible, yet he had been afraid, he was still in so much pain. It was now that he could see the forest floor was cleaved with deep and terrible scars, where the dragons had fought, and where bits of mountain had come shattering down. Still the wind went whispering in its indifferent way, healing words, patient words, words formed in darkness.

He could not see very well; he thought of sleep and whispered his thanks while trying to make out the pattern. There was something different about the way it was woven. Omega’s face was longer and sharper and ringed by wisps of smoke and fire, but he could not make sense of it right now.  


The stars stopped for no one as they skidded in silence across a sloping sky. Bloodied bands and blemishes lay below them in the trees.

There will be more blood, and more death, Burton thought, having been carried back from that place, the pain of it still in his eyes. Darkness seeping from every wound, darkness repairing itself. The sounds of the Forest growing deeper. The Dekalt would come for him again--but he would be ready then. He and his dragon, who hummed and drifted on the wind like a leaf. He must rest now, he must dream.

He said softly, “Surely Alpha will know now of your survival. Your location.”  


“Good,” said the god. “I have grown tired of waiting.” For this was a time of great change.  


**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted on January 4, 2017 to my [RP blog.](http://obsidianonslaught.tumblr.com/post/155402824618/exodus)


End file.
